


houston in the blind

by goddesspharo



Category: Actor RPF, Irish Actor RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-09 13:03:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10412751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goddesspharo/pseuds/goddesspharo
Summary: It turns out that even the best laid plans have a way of going off the deep end when there's no human element to troubleshoot problems as they are occurring.





	

**Author's Note:**

> While going through old folders, I found this _Ex Machina_ RPF I'd written for a ficathon circa 2015 because space AUs are always going to be my jam.

 

Domhnall has already been drunk for the better part of a week when NASA unexpectedly calls. The unspoken luxury of being on the B-team is that there are only two possible outcomes: the mission goes off without a hitch or it gets scrubbed because someone discovers a gas leak on launch day. Either way, neither option requires that the second string remain sober while their golden child doppelgangers train daily and prepare for lives without excess. When it is a foregone conclusion that varsity is going to state, the only responsibility JV has is to sit back and enjoy the all-expenses-paid trip to the superdome.

 

It is no wonder then that Domhnall almost misses the call. At first, he can't hear the ringing over the loud hum of the motel's shitty air conditioner, but when he goes to grab the bottle of beer from his bedside table, he sees his phone dancing like there's an earthquake. Even after wiping his fingers on his shorts, it takes three unsuccessful swipes before his phone recognizes the motion of his sweaty thumb.

 

"Congratulations, Mr. Gleeson," the far sounding voice on the other end says. "You're moving up to the major leagues."

 

"I'm not following," he mumbles because it is honestly a struggle to put that many words together when his head is swimming from the foolish combination of tequila shots and way too much bourbon that he had with Clemence earlier. They'd consumed enough to put down a burly rugby team and yet the furthest he had gotten was his hand up her skirt before she kicked him out of her room in the name of a friendship that Domhnall was fairly certain they did not possess. 

 

NASA director Garland tells him that Flight Surgeon Eddie Redmayne grounded Felicity Jones because her measles titers returned undetectable. Given the crew's recent promotional trip to Disneyland, a hot bed of communicable disease and unvaccinated children, NASA simply could not risk the success of a multibillion dollar endeavor by sending her to Mars.

 

"You're going to space in three days, son."

 

Domhnall blacks out right as Garland tells him to report to work in eight hours.

 

 

*

 

 

There is a certain camaraderie that forms between astronauts when they go through training together, the early morning calls and hours spent in flight simulators designed to test their grit and fortify a sense of teamwork until they align like Tetris pieces. It's the grown up version of bonding with your cabin mates at sleep away camp. Domhnall himself forged a similar bond with his trio of alternates, but theirs was based on the shared _wink wink nudge nudge_ knowledge that they were getting away with a government-sponsored spring break. They didn't learn about each other by observing how they function under times of simulated catastrophe but rather by how well they guessed the names of historical figures based on obtuse clues given during nightly drinking games. 

 

It is very difficult to walk into one of these pre-existing connections, especially three days before being jettisoned off to spend the next six months together, but NASA orders the others to play nice and accepts that as good enough before shoving Domhnall in a simulator with them for a crash course. Jones doesn't exactly give him her blessing when she passes on the baton and now, as Domhnall slips into her seat and fumbles to adjust the straps to fit his taller frame, he can feel his new teammates watching him the way guards observe a prisoner on transport. 

 

"Commander Isaac," Domhnall greets with a nod once he's situated. "Ready on your mark, sir."

 

There is a beat so long and silent that even Mission Control doesn't make a sound before the corner of the other man's lips curl up. "You call me Commander Isaac and I look around for my pops. It's just Oscar. You ready to make history?"

 

Domhnall thinks he hears someone on comms breathe a sigh of relief. When he glances over at command module pilot Alicia Vikander, she looks away with a frown.

 

 

*

 

 

There is something a touch mortifying to have just his father be there the night before the launch so Domhnall is grateful to Rachel for coming to see him off as well. They had gone on one date while she was rebounding from her rebound but it was so disastrous that it felt like twenty bad dates looped together into a singularly forgettable experience. The only thing unexpected about it was the friendship that bloomed afterwards with Rachel calling Domhnall for reassurance every time a new nice guy relationship imploded and Domhnall asking for favors like "please don't make me look like a friendless loser in front of the other astronauts" at times like this.

 

"Don't overfeed my cat, McAdams," he warns again across the chain link fence between civilians and spacemen. "I don't want to come home to Garfield."

 

"Bring me back something that matches your hair," Rachel calls out, flipping him the bird before squeezing his fist goodbye.

 

Domhnall watched her slip into the passenger seat of his father's Buick, the dust kicking up behind their back tires when they drive away a second later. Domhnall's attention drifts to his left where Oscar is sucking face with a high maintenance blonde with endless legs who definitely did not get that engagement ring from him.

 

Even further past them, Alicia speaks in tense whispers with her asshole boyfriend. The solar system may be vast but the astronaut community is fairly small so it takes Domhnall less than ten seconds to recognize Fassbender, a shark who had gone to Berkeley with him and carried a notorious reputation for dating with an all-you-can-eat buffet mentality.

 

"Fuck you, Michael," he hears Alicia spit back before turning on her heels and walking away at a quick clip while both Domhnall and her now presumably _ex_ -boyfriend ogle her ass.

 

 

*

 

 

The basic outline of the _Ex Machina_ mission is as follows: once they leave the Earth's orbit and go dark, they put the ship in autopilot and settle into hibernation pods timed for 39 days, which should be how long it takes to arrive if Mars truly is at perihelion and Earth is at aphelion, the closest the two planets have ever come in recorded history. 

 

The first part of the plan goes off without a hitch. They eat dinner under the glow of their home planet, all at once so vast and yet so small. Mission Control makes them do a complete systems check one last time and they each redo the calculation for coordinates to Mars before Alicia enters their destination for the onboard computer. 

 

"Have a good sleep," Mission Control says before signing off for good.

 

They shed the goofy silver jumpsuits to reveal what amounts to skimpy black speedos underneath. Domhnall has seen Alicia in far more revealing clothes in the locker room alone but something about the way she moves throughout the ship so freely in what looks like a tube top and glorified boy shorts as she helps lock Oscar into his pod quickens Domhnall's pulse. All he wants to do in that moment is peel off her obscenely short shorts with his teeth and trace a path up her tanned legs until he becomes intimately familiar with her taste and the only sound on the ship is his name from her lips. 

 

Suddenly Domhnall wishes he was the one tasked with setting the autopilot after the other two had gone into stasis so that he could lock her in and then take care of any boners that should arise before he going into REM sleep for a month. 

 

"Sweet dreams," Alicia says almost tenderly as she brushes Domhnall's hair off his forehead before closing him in. Domhnall thinks about oil spills and dead puppies until he drifts off.

 

 

*

 

 

Predictably he is the last to wake up from deep sleep, his hair slightly longer and his face covered by a ginger beard. Domhnall's first thought is _thank God I'm still alive_ followed quickly by an acute awareness that something isn't right. As he pushes out of his bed for the past 39 days, he can hear Alicia rapidly tapping on a keyboard.

 

"Snap out of it, Sleeping Beauty," Oscar shouts in his direction. "We have a problem and I could sure use an astrophysicist to break down for me how fucked we are in layman terms."

 

It turns out that even the best laid plans have a way of going off the deep end when there's no human element to troubleshoot problems as they are occurring. As best as Domhnall can figure, there was a piece of meteorite in their path that no one predicted and just the slightest impact was enough to push them far enough off their pre-set path that the system could no longer course correct itself. 

 

"So where are we?" Alicia asks impatiently.

 

"Nowhere close to Mars," he answers, scratching his beard. Her eyes flash with _something_ but before he can figure out what that is, Oscar interrupts his train of thought to ask what that means exactly. 

 

"I'm going to need some coffee before I can tell with any certainty, but off the top of my head? I'd say that means we're very, _very_ fucked."

 

 

*

 

 

They're seventy million miles away from their intended target and floating aimlessly in space like a lazy child in a community pool. Houston is unreachable and Mars is a distant dream at this point. This is exactly the nightmare scenario Domhnall never allowed his brain to consider when both of his feet were planted firmly on the ground. 

 

Oscar comes up with a crazy plan to burn a third of their remaining fuel cells to change course so they are going in the vague direction of Earth. They can make it back in eighteen months if they are able to stretch their rations for that long and are not knocked off course by something else. It is literally a shot in the dark but it's all they have.

 

Domhnall can't bring himself to agree until he quadruple checks their numbers again. He banishes himself to the study with nothing but a pencil and a graphing calculator and doesn't emerge until his brain is swimming with so many equations that he can no longer keep them straight.

 

When Domhnall returns to the control room, he initially thinks that Oscar and Alicia are hunched over the guidance panel to work out which cells to burn but then he hears her nearly inaudible gasp followed by a succession of short breaths. If the thunderous drumming in Domhnall's ears didn't heighten his senses, he would've surely missed the almost imperceptible motion of Oscar's hips behind her and the way Alicia's head almost falls back against his shoulder.

 

The snap of the pencil breaking in Domhnall's hand goes unheard by everyone. 

 

 

*

 

 

It takes Oscar four weeks to discover that they're leaking a small but steady stream of oxygen into space. Alicia starts laughing like this is the least surprising thing he could have ever told them. 

 

"I'm just going to pop out there and fix it," Oscar announces like it's as simple as slapping some rubber cement onto a crack in his favorite mug. 

 

"Is that safe?" Domhnall asks stupidly even though a traitorous part of his brain knows that they would have a better chance of making it back home if the shuttle only had to support two people instead of three. If he's being completely honest with himself, Domhnall can admit that the kinder Oscar is to him, the angrier he feels until it's a white hot rage burning just beneath his fingertips. Interestingly, the same can't be said when he looks at Alicia, the want coursing through his marrow every time he closes his eyes and hears that soft _oh_ again. 

 

"Help me suit up," Oscar says, breaking Domhnall out of his thoughts by clapping him on the back. At the airlock, Domhnall checks the CO2 detectors while Oscar slips into the suit. As he is being handed the helmet, Oscar says, "Watch out for Vikander."

 

"Excuse me?"

 

"Swedish neutrality isn't what it used to be," he answers cryptically.

 

 

*

 

 

"We both know that there are only enough supplies to last twelve months," Alicia says one day when they are alone in the kitchen. " _At best._ "

 

Domhnall stirs water into the oatmeal packet that he didn't have at breakfast. He was waiting for someone to bring this up sooner but now that it has happened, he doesn't want to have the conversation. 

 

"If we each eat a third less—"

 

"How does one consume a third less air?" she asks with enough barely concealed anger there to destroy a man. He can practically hear the ice crystals in her voice when she says, "Oscar should have caught the oxygen breach sooner."

 

"At least he was able to fix it."

 

Personal space is a thing of the past as she crowds him against the stainless steel counter until her hips are dangerously close to touching his. Domhnall can feels his breathing get shallow when she whispers, "Did you enjoy the show?"

 

Alicia doesn't break her stare as her hand grazes the drawstring of his NASA issued sweats, the scrape sounding obscenely loud as it echoes in his mind. 

 

"There are cameras."

 

"This is a blind spot." Domhnall doesn't want to know how she knows that, but it's all the permission he needs to trail his hands down her sides. The air between them is now charged with a different kind of want, the urgency palpable even as he reminds her halfheartedly that this is a bad idea.

 

"You only live once."

 

When Alicia kisses him, she bares teeth. 

 

 

*

 

 

The CO2 scrubbers malfunction on day 64 as the sleeping console lights up all at once in red danger symbols and beeps warnings of certain death. Domhnall manages to reroute everything to another set before they all go deaf, but it's a stop-gap until Alicia can isolate the problem to a single panel on the starboard side. Domhnall offers to go out there to take care of it.

 

"Might as well see space unencumbered while I'm here." 

 

"I'll be here when you get back." He smiles at Alicia as she double checks that the suit is secure.

 

The biggest challenge is prying the panel loose but once Domhnall gets that done, it looks like a relatively easy fix. Initially, Oscar offers running commentary on the vastness of space with the smooth-talking cadence of someone hosting a radiothon as he likens how black and still it is to the ultimate yoga nirvana.

 

"For God's sake, will you let him work?" Alicia finally snaps through comms.

 

Domhnall laughs as Oscar shoots back that it's not _his_ fault she never wants to explore their surroundings. "You need to get out of this tin can, Vik. _Shit_ , she's giving me a look now. Isaac out."

 

The actual circuitry looks fine when Domhnall tests it but he disconnects and patches everything together again just to make sure. It doesn't take more than twenty minutes before he's done. 

 

"All clear. Anyone copy?" Domhnall asks when his words are met with silence. He pushes himself off the side of the ship to propel back to the door. His massively gloved fingers clumsily punch in the code to the airlock. The difference between the galaxy out there and their lives inside is staggering, the harsh lights of their artificial surroundings blinding as the air blasts him in the decontamination hub. When forty seconds are up and the door slides open, Alicia is waiting for him on the other side. 

 

"Welcome back."

 

Domhnall blinks rapidly to get his eyes to adjust to the fluorescent lighting and will away the fat blobs of lens flare. 

 

"The connections looked fine," Domhnall says as he snaps off the helmet. "It might be a software error."

 

"I took care of the problem."

 

Alicia smiles as she holds up her bloody hands.

 

 


End file.
